Lee concludes his brilliant Machineries of Empire trilogy (Raven Stratagem) with this volume that follows nine years after the soldier Kel Cheris—who carries some of the memories of the assassin, general, and mass murderer Shuos Jedao—has splintered the intergalactic hexarchate by creating a renegade calendar. Bewilderingly, Lee begins by introducing a newly conscious Jedao, one who last remembers life as a Shuos cadet and who owes his current existence to hexarch Nirai Kujen, hidden leader of the tech faction. Kujen has incarnated Jedao to lead his Kel troops to conquer the fragments of the hexarchate and reinstate the old calendar, with its remembrance celebrations that involved an untold number of deaths by torture. Each iteration of Jedao works to find a way to kill the seemingly immortal Kujen, whose consciousness is somehow sustained by the ritual sacrifices. Servitor robots and sentient moth spaceships also seek to be free of Kujen. Lee’s highly imaginative creation, which includes military formations that can have effects as potent as weapons, is a triumph. (June)